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11 Ways Excel Hurts Your Project Management........................................................................1

Create a Simple, Effective To-do List Using Excel Filter Feature................................................1

To Do List With Drop Downs

 The weights are given as follows (in the pic below). If you want to
change the weights, you can easily do it by changing these values. In the
download file, columns G to J are hidden. Unhide it to change the weights.

 To calculate progress using the progress bar, we calculate:

 Total Score: Add all the weights for all the activities. For example, if
there are 2 high priority tasks and 1 medium priority task, and 1 low
priority task, the total score would be 14 (5+5+3+1).
 Completed Score: Here we add all the weights for all the activities
that are completed. For example, if out of 4 activities, 1 high priority
activity has been completed, then the Completed Score would be 5.
  % Completed: The value when we divide Completed Score with
Total Score. For example, in the above case, it would be 35.7%
(5/14).

11 Ways Excel Hurts Your Project Management

Are you using Excel for project management?

There are only four reasons why you might actually use Excel as a project management tool:

1. Your dad is a product manager with Excel

2. Your dad is Bill Gates
3. You are Bill Gates (Hi!)
4. You are hoping to get money from Bill Gates (Uh, can we talk?)

As you can see, there are very few reasons why you should be using Excel for project
management.

Don’t get me wrong, Excel is a powerful software for managing financial data. As far as
businesses are concerned, it could be one of the most powerful innovations since sliced bread.

Excel can do awesome things. But even sliced bread can’t do everything.

And for project management, Excel is stale.

Here’s why most teams still use Excel for project management:

 They’re familiar with it.

  Typing in tasks into rows is easy.
 There are plenty of free Excel project management templates to download.
 You can create charts and graphs with it.

So, what’s wrong with it?

Nothing – if you are perfectly satisfied with your team’s productivity, communication and

collaboration.

But you know that’s hardly the case with most teams.

1. Excel for Project Management Causes Communication Gaps

Project team members need to constantly communicate with each other to ask questions, share
files, information and updates, provide comments and feedback and so on.

✖ Excel Limitation

There’s no way in Excel to do any of the above. You will have to communicate over email,
or Slack.

This means digging through different tools to stay on track of all discussions about a
particular task. People keep asking questions that have already been answered. Or worse, they
miss an update entirely, leading to mistakes.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

Communication is easy in social project management tools like ClickUp because you can see
every single detail and all updates about each task within the tool.

Task Description

Enter all the requirements of each task in its description box.

Comment

ClickUp has a commenting feature just like Facebook. You can see all the discussions that
have taken place about a specific task or subtask.

Upload Files

Upload files and links to a particular task for easy access to all task-related documents.
ClickUp also has an integration with Slack, and syncs all your conversations between the two
tools!

2. No Individual To-Do Lists in Excel Project Templates

Excel project management templates are designed for team projects. However, they make
lousy to-do lists for individual team members.

✖ Excel Limitation

Your project sheet in Excel would define the work items each team member needs to
accomplish. However, everyone will have to finish several sub-tasks to complete every task.
Therefore, they use their own additional to-do lists to note down all these subtasks.

Clutter and Confusion

Your team members could try adding sub-tasks to the same Excel sheet, but that would make
your document extremely cluttered and cause confusion. Each team member starts adding
their own tab and things get out of control. After all, the entire team doesn’t need to see all
those work items.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

ClickUp solves these problems because it’s an all-inclusive productivity platform. It’s a

project management tool as well as an individual to-do list.

The project management tool has two broad types of dashboards  – a Team view, to see the all
the details of team projects.

And a Me view where people see only the tasks that are allocated to them.

Both views come with List-style as well as Kanban-style visualizations, and you can toggle
between these visualizations with a single click.

3. Tasks are Forgotten in Excel

Many tasks involve coordinating with different people to deliver other sub-tasks.  

But just because you’ve emailed someone to get a customer testimonial, or check out a bug,
doesn’t mean that they will add it to their to-do list and set a deadline.

The result?
✖ Excel Limitation

People will forget, until you remind them a week later! Any task that’s not documented on the
Excel sheet, can slip through the cracks.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

ClickUp allows every team member to assign a task to anyone in the team and set a deadline.
The assignee will see it as part of their to-do list and get a ClickUp notification. No need to
email them, too.

You will stop wasting precious hours following up and reclaim that for actual work.

4. Mobile Viewing is Difficult in Excel

Spreadsheets are simply not designed for mobile!

✖ Excel Limitation

You can’t see the entire sheet on a small screen and will have to keep scrolling, zooming or
squinting to see details of a single task or your project management dashboard. Editing
documents is painful and its common to make inadvertent changes to other cells.

Honestly, it’s easier to carry printouts of your project spreadsheets in a briefcase rather than
use Excel on your mobile phone.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

All project management tools have mobile apps and ClickUp has a pretty great one!

It’s easy to check out different aspects of the project. Check out the big picture and visualize
all your projects, or drill down and check out a specific subtask.

Simple, right?

5. Task Updates Require Manual Follow Ups

When teams use Excel for project management, team members keep individual to-do lists.

✖ Excel Limitation

Managing two tools is simply too much work. So, most people do not regularly update the
Excel spreadsheet with the progress on the task.
There’s no way for project managers or anyone else to know what the status of each task is.
People keep emailing – “Hey, where are we on that thing?”

Project teams using Excel for project management also have more meetings – the sole
purpose of which are to update Excel sheets!

Do you really want to waste hours every week behind staying updated? Especially when all
this can be automated through ClickUp?

✔ ClickUp Advantage

Since your entire team has all of their individual to-do lists in ClickUp, you avoid the
headache of multiple tools and repetitive meetings rehashing the same project updates. Project
managers and all concerned team members get automatic notifications whenever someone
completes a specific task or subtask.

6. Excel Templates are Difficult to Customize

There are plenty of Excel project management templates available. But finding one that’s a
great fit for your team is tough.

✖ Excel Limitation

Project managers will need hours to customize templates for their own teams. Moreover,
unless you are a whiz at Excel, you will have to find someone who understands functions to
do the customization for you.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

A dedicated project management software does not need any customization – simply because
it’s designed for one thing only – managing projects!

It just takes 10 minutes to set up ClickUp, add team members and start using it!

7. The Excel Software Keeps Crashing

Excel isn’t really a project management software. If too many people open the same
spreadsheet at the same time, it will keep crashing.

✖ Excel Limitation

The moment a file crashes, you will have to spend precious time recovering the project file
and checking up with all team members to ensure that the copy is up-to-date.
✔ ClickUp Advantage

Cloud-based project management software like ClickUp almost never crash! You have
99.98% uptime.

8. Access Rights Can’t Be Customized in Spreadsheets

Who has access to your Excel project management spreadsheet? You have two choices.

✖ Excel Limitation

You can give editing access to everyone, but then, you have no way of keeping track of who
has made what changes to the file, unless you use Office 365.

Moreover, do you really want every single employee to be able to view projects and tasks that
only senior management should have access to? This poses serious confidentiality problems.  

Alternatively, you could just give viewing rights to the team and editing rights only to the
project manager. But then, the project manager will have a full-time job updating and tracking
the project sheet.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

ClickUp allows you to grant different user permissions and access rights according to teams
and projects.

9. Excel Doesn’t Work for Agile Project Management

Agile project management is all about adaptability. We don’t make elaborate plans about
every single step of a project anymore. Unforeseen factors can creep in and make large
sections of your plan irrelevant.

Agile teams need to be able to change course rapidly in the face of these unforeseen events.
But if you use Excel as your project management tool, it’s extremely difficult to change tack.

✖ Excel Limitation

Updating a spreadsheet is way more cumbersome than updating a project management

software. You will have to update, add or delete rows, and update functions and links between
different worksheets.

Project managers will have to do the entire updating themselves, because you don’t want
someone to make a mistake which messes up the entire sheet.
✔ ClickUp Advantage

Whatever changes team members make to their own tasks in ClickUp gets automatically
reflected in the project dashboards.

Updating any dedicated project management software is easy. Period!

10. Project Management Dashboards are Lousy

Project managers and senior leaders should be able to examine the big picture of all the
company’s projects at a single glance in simple management dashboards. Trying to do that in
Excel is a nightmare.

✖ Excel Limitation

Even if you did find an Excel template which has project dashboards, it would be limited to
visualizations like Gantt charts which have limited use for Agile project management.

And you would have to have the skills and the time to use maddeningly complicated formulae
in excel to design your own management dashboards.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

ClickUp has several built-in project dashboard views.

Use the board view to have a Kanban/ Agile view.

List View for a GTD-style view.

Box view to get a broad idea of what each team member is working on and the team projects.
ClickUp is the only project management software that lets you toggle between different views
with a single click.

Cool, right?
Even though we’ve laid out lots of reasons why Excel doesn’t work for project management, I
know you probably still have a few more concerns before making the switch. So in this
section, we’ll attempt to answer all of your Excel project management questions.

11. No Reporting in Excel

Here’s another thing. Reporting in Excel is a hassle. That seems counter-intuitive, since
Excel’s main function is storing and reporting on data.

✖ Excel Limitation

In Excel, it’s difficult to see what tasks are behind or ahead of schedule. It’s also difficult to
gauge workloads for individual team members.

✔ ClickUp Advantage

In ClickUp, you get clear reports to see who has worked on what, how long it took them to
finish their tasks compared to the estimate and more. Advanced reporting in ClickUp helps
you keep track of your entire team, improving team collaboration along the way. That’s
impossible to do in Excel.

Excel Project Management FAQ

What about Gantt charts in Excel? (But why?)

Look, I get it. A lot of people like Gantt charts. You can quickly see where your tasks are and
how they overlap with one another. If you’re building your own Gantt charts in Excel, well
then congratulations. That’s a hard task that, honestly, you shouldn’t be doing unless it’s your
hobby or like we said above, your dad is a product manager at Excel. But remember, there are
lots of options beyond Excel for Gantt charts, so don’t feel like you have to re-invent the
wheel.

The ClickUp Time view also provides a quick snapshot of where your projects stand. You can
also insert unscheduled tasks right onto the calendar. ClickUp is also working on new Gantt
chart / timeline capabilities that are coming soon! You can check out our public roadmap to
see exactly what we’re working on.

What about project management Excel templates? (But why?)

Sure, you can find Excel project management templates out there on the Internet. Knock
yourself out. Again, though, I have to ask: why? Do you love Excel that much? There are so
many better options for managing your projects, due dates, dependencies. ClickUp has all
of those features–for free.

Back ten or 15 years ago, there weren’t as many options to keep up with tasks. You’d have to
pay an insane amount for Microsoft Project, so building a template for Excel project
management made a little more sense. Now with so many free project management
software options in the cloud, there’s no need.

It’s a waste of time to build out Excel templates that you constantly must update when
ClickUp can do all of that for you. You can change fast, assign out tasks and finish the work
that you’re trying to put in Excel. No Excel template will be able to do all of that for you.

And you can even invite your whole team to participate with you. Excel does a lot of
incredible things, but project management isn’t one of them.

Can I import my Excel files into ClickUp or other project management tools? (Yes!)

Yes, ClickUp offers you the ability to import your tasks from Excel. You’ll need to save it as
a CSV file to start. Once you sign up for a ClickUp account, you can begin the import
process. Here’s how to do it and you can find more from our help doc.

By default, you’ll select a Space  to import the tasks into, and we’ll create a new Project
titled CSV Import  with your imported tasks. After the import, you can move tasks around as
you please.

Also by default, we’ll import them into only one list,  but if you prefer separating your tasks,
you can opt to map a column named List  during your import. Doing this will separate your
imported tasks into multiple lists.

Summary

Let’s summarize the limitations of Excel as project management software:

1. Excel Causes Communication Gaps

2. No Individual To-Do Lists in Excel Project Templates
3. Tasks are Forgotten in Excel
4. Mobile Viewing is Difficult in Excel
5. Task Updates Require Manual Follow Ups
6. Excel Templates are Difficult to Customize
7. The Excel Software Keeps Crashing
8. Access Rights Can’t Be Customized in Spreadsheets
9. Excel Doesn’t Work for Agile Project Management
10. Project Dashboards are Lousy
11. No Advanced Reporting

Using Excel is a sure-fire way to drastically slow down your team projects and productivity.
Instead, why not opt for a 100% free project management tool like ClickUp? Import
your CSV file now! 
Wes Brummette
Vice President of Operations at ClickUp

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Create a Simple, Effective To-do List Using Excel Filter

Feature

Nowadays, it's easy to find "time management" and "multi-tasking"

skills on many job posts. The certain fact is that employers are now
requiring you to juggle many different tasks in different time frames
to get things done. So how can we stay organized and let nothing
fall through the cracks? Most often than not, you will need a good
system to track your task and to remind yourself of upcoming
deadline.

There are different apps available for this purpose on all platforms.
However, why complicating things while we can create something
quickly on our own right? For my work purpose, I created a simple
tracking system in Excel, and use the Filter feature to help me sort
through different task. Creating a to-do list in excel only takes
minutes. It is simple to add or edit tasks, you can format it any way
you want, and it works! So let's take a look at how to create a
simple, efficient to-do list in Excel, using the filter feature.

Step 1: Open Excel and Add Some Column Headers

First, open up your Microsoft Excel (I'm using Excel 2007 but the
steps should work with any version. This is a very classic feature of
Excel)

Entering some headers for your column. Here I have Task name,
Status, Deadline, and Note. Depending on the nature of your work,
you can add as many column as you need. For example, for your
tasks, you may want to note Contact Person, Required Tools, or
even Budget notes and so on.
 Step 2: Fill in the Content of Your Tasks

In this step, we just fill in the tasks you need to do. I like to have the
file open all day long on my laptop and add tasks immediately when
it comes up. This way, you don't forget any assigned tasks.
Remember to save the file after you add or edit any tasks. A major
plus to this method is that Excel uses up very little memory and the
file is very portable, usually nowhere near 1 MB.
Note that the name of the tasks and status columns should be filled
out. This will help to filter them later. Other columns can be filled or
left blank at your discretion.

Step 3: Add Filter to Your List

Here is the fun part: adding filter to your list.

To do so, just click on any of the headers (first row). Then select
Filter under Sort & Filter menu.

This will add filter to your list. You only have to do this once. After
you save the file and open it next time, the filter will still be there.

Step 4: Use the Filter to Sort Through Your Tasks

After you added the filter, you will see little arrows next to each of
your column headers.

I like to sort through my tasks by the status of the tasks. When I fill
in the task content, I assigned a status to it, either Done, Pending,
or On Going.

I like to see only the Pending and On Going tasks, but don't want to
delete the Done tasks. The Filter option can let me do so. Simply
click on the little arrow next to Status, I can select or deselect any of
the option. Here, I select only On Going and Pending
 Step 5: Finish!

Once I applied the filter, you can see that my list is shortened to
show only Pending and On Going tasks.

When I need to look at previous tasks that I have finished, I can go

back and select Done in the filter options.
Thanks to this feature, I can quickly visualize my tasks without
removing anything from the record.

This is a very simple list, but can be developed to fit your needs and
style. I can add as many fields of information as I want, and
customize the font and colors to make it prettier. It's very flexible
and super easy to use!